Postmarked the Stars

7.ICEBOUND MURDER

“How large was the thing we stunned?” Ali asked. He made no move to unseal his tunic, and he still carried his stunner ready as if prepared to fight off an attack.

“Taller than any of us.” Dane could not give a more concise measurement. What difference did the size of the thing make? It was a menace, but they had proved stunners could handle it.

“By rights”—Rip had bolstered his weapon and now measured in the air another distance, about a foot between his two hands—”it should be no bigger than this, and, well, there are other differences, too.”

“Suppose you say what you mean, loud and clear.” Dane was in no mood for any more puzzles.

“On Asgard”—Ali took up the explanation—”there’s a burrowing creature, not too different really from a Terran ant, except in size and the fact that it does not live in colonies but is solitary. Only it doesn’t grow hair or fur, and it is not able to decapitate a man with its claws or stamp him flat. They call it—the settlers do—an antline. What we met out there is an antline with embellishments.”

“But—” Dane began a protest when Rip cut in.

“Yes, but and but and but! We’re both sure that was—is—an antline with modifications, just as the embryos were modified, just as these brachs are not running true to type.”

“Then the box—” Dane’s thoughts leaped to the danger they had buried. Stotz’s guard must not have been secure. The radiation had worked again on some creature burrowing too near its hiding place.

Rip might have been reading his thoughts. “Not the box,” he said flatly. “We went to look. It’s undisturbed. Also that thing could not have altered overnight to its present form. We did a little backtracking. It’s been here since before we set down.”

“What proof have you of that?”

“A lair burrow.” Alie’s face mirrored his distaste. “Complete with the refuse. No, it’s plainly been that size and been resident there for a good deal longer than two days. But it’s an antline.”

“How can you be so sure? You say there are superficial resemblances between a Terran ant and the antline. There could well be a native animal or insect here with the same general conformation, could there not? And this has differences—you say so yourself.”

“Rational reasoning,” Ali replied. “If there was not a museum of natural history on Asgard, and if it hadn’t happened that we had a shipment for it some voyages back, some Fortian artifacts that Van Ryke wanted given special handling, we wouldn’t know. While the curator was signing off our responsibility, we did some looking around. There was an earlier type of antline that died off long before the first settlers arrived. But some got caught in flash floods, were buried deep in peat, and were preserved. Those were large, haired, and enough like that thing out there to be its loving brother or sister! Asgard being a goodly number of parsecs from here, how do you explain the transportation of a living life form that died out on another world about fifty thousand planet years ago?”

“The box—” Dane kept returning to the only rational explanation. But from that it was easy to take the next step. “Another box?”

Rip nodded. “Not only another box, but surely an importation of other life forms. There is no duplication of such an animal from one world to the next. So, someone imported a modern antline, gave it the retrogressive treatment, and produced that thing. Just as we have the dragons—”

“The dragons!” Dane remembered the missing cargo. “Did it eat them?”

“No—little one—freed them—” The words were high pitched with a metallic undernote. Dane stared at his two companions. Neither one of them had said that. And they, in turn, were looking at a point behind him as if they could not believe in what they saw. He turned his head.

Once more the male brach hunched on the shelf where he had sat to listen to the chittering of Dane’s voice out of the disk. But now the alien had something in his forepaws, pressed against his throat—the translator.

“Little one freed them.” The brach was certainly speaking, and the words issuing from the disk made sense. “He was curious, and he thought that it was not right—those things in our home. They hurt him when he opened cage. He called—we went to him. The great thing came, but the dragons were already gone into the woods. This is so.”

“By the brazen hoofs of Kathor!” exclaimed Ali. “It’s talking!”

“With the translator!” Dane was almost as startled. He had left that other throat mike some distance away. The brach must have gone after it, working out that Dane’s was what made the man’s voice intelligible, and was now using it. But what a gigantic upstep in intelligence that action revealed—unless the brachs had never been truly the animals they had seemed and the radiation box had not as far back to take them as the Terrans believed.

“You talk.” The brach indicated the mike it held pressed to its throat and then pointed to the disk. “I heard.

I talk, you hear. This is true. But the dragon things not eaten by the big one. They were big also—too big for cage place. Pushing on wall, clawing door—Little one thought they be too tight, open to give them room. They fly—”

“Fly?” Dane echoed. It was true the creatures had flapping skin appendages that would in the far future be the wings of the lathsmers. But that they could use them for flying—!

“We have to get them back, and if they are flying in the woods—” he began when the brach added:

“They do not fly good, many times on ground—hop, hop—” He gestured with his free paw to represent progress in a jerky manner.

“They could be anywhere,” Rip said. The brach looked to him questioningly, and Dane realized the alien could understand only when Dane spoke with the translator.

“They could have gone in any direction,” he repeated for the alien.

“Seek water—need water—” the brach replied. “Water there—” He pointed now to the south, as if he could see pond, lake, or streams through the solid wall of the LB.

“But the lake is in that direction.” Rip nodded to the northwest, where it lay behind the plateau.

“That direction—lake,” Dane translated.

“No, not go there—but there!” And again the alien waved to the south.

“You see them?” Ali asked. Then realizing that Dane alone could voice the question, he added, “Ask him why he is so sure.”

But Dane had already begun. If the long-snouted face with its so alien features could have mirrored the emotion surprise, Dane believed he would be reading it. Then the brach’s paw touched that part of his head that would be a human forehead and answered, “The dragons want water bad, so we feel—feel the want—”

“Telepathy!” Rip almost shouted.

But Dane was not sure. “You feel what thing thinks?” He hoped that was clear.

“Not what thinks, only what other brach thinks—sometimes. What thing feels, we feel. It feels strong, we know.”

“Emotional broadcast of some kind,” Ali summed up.

“Little one feel dragons want out, so let them,” continued the brach. “Then dragon hurt little one. A thing of badness—”

“The cold,” Rip said. “If they went hunting water to the south, the cold will get them.”

“So we have to find them first,” Dane answered.

“Someone has to stay for the com,” Ali pointed out.

“Pilot does that,” Dane said swiftly before Rip could protest. “We take travel coms with us. You can signal us back if you have to.”

He expected a protest from Shannon, but the other was already hauling out packs, opening the storage cabinets for supplies. It was the brach who spoke.

“Go with. Can feel dragons—tell where—”

“Too cold,” Dane returned quickly. He might have lost part of the cargo, but the brachs were infinitely more important than the hatched embryos, and he was not going to risk them.

“I don’t know.” Rip held one of the supply bags. “Put a small heat unit in this, cut to low, pack our friend in with that”—he nodded toward the padding they had stripped out of the cage—“and he would be warm enough. What he says makes sense. If he can give you a guide to the dragons, you could save a lot of time and energy.”

Dane took the bag from Rip. It was watertight, pressurized in part, meant to carry supplies on wholly inimically atmosphered planets, another of the save-life equipment of the LB, and it was certainly roomy enough to hold the brach, even with the warming factors Rip had listed. If what the brach boasted was the truth—that he could keep in touch with the lathsmer changelings by some kind of emotional direction finder—then his company would keep them from losing time. And Dane had the feeling, which grew stronger every time he left the LB, that the sooner they were out of this wilderness, the better.

Ali’s trained hands carried out Rip’s suggestion. A small heat unit went into the bottom of the bag, and the padding was wrapped around and around the sides, leaving a center core in which the brach could be inserted. The shoulder straps on the side could be easily lengthened to fit Dane, while Ali himself could carry the other supply bag. They each had a personna com clipped to the hoods of their jackets, and in addition Dane’s translator was fastened close to his cheek in his.

The brach had gone to his family in the hammock, and from the subdued murmur there Dane guessed he was explaining his coming absence. If there were protests from the others, Dane was not to know, for the male had left the translator to be affixed in the bag.

It was midmorning when they set out, taking the path back to the cage. The door swung open, and the antline, if mutated antline the thing really was, had gone. Marks, deep grooved in the ground, suggested that it had crawled rather than walked to the eastward.

“Lair is that way,” Ali observed. “I think that the lie out in the cold for so long didn’t do it any good. At least you can hear it coming.”

“If it is an antline returned to an earlier form—” Dane still found it difficult to accept that.

“Then who brought it here and why?” Ali ended his question for him. “That is something to think about. I believe we can assume that ours was not the first box, also that they were too hurried over shipping this one. Looks almost as if they were being rushed in some way. The Combine didn’t have any trouble on this mail run. Which means if another box came through, it was better shielded, or else there was no live cargo to cause suspicious complications. And that I can’t believe. The settlers have regular embryo shipments, not only of lathsmers, but other livestock.”

“They may not be using regular transportation—whoever ‘they’ are,” Dane pointed out.

“True. There’s only one main port here, and they don’t keep a planet-wide radar system. There’s no need for it. There’s nothing here to attract any poachers, jacks, or smugglers—or is there?”

“Drugs,” ventured Dane, supplying the first and easiest answer, some narcotic easily raised in virgin ground, a small, light cargo bringing a fantastic return for growers’ and suppliers’ trouble.

“But why the box? Unless it is used to force growth in some way. Drugs might be the answer. If so, we may be facing some blaster-happy jacks. But why import an antline and turn it into a monster? And why did that dead man come on board wearing your face? That seems more like a frame for the Queen. I can suggest a good many different solutions—”

“Water ahead—” The pipe of the brack rang in Dane’s ear.

“Do you sense the dragons?” Dane attended to the matter now at hand.

“Water—no dragon now. But dragon needed water.” “If he doesn’t pick them up,” Ali commented when Dane passed on this information, “they may be already dead.”

Dane shared the other’s pessimism. They now threaded a way among the trees, their boots sinking into a decayed mass of fallen leaves. The brush, which had been like a wall before, was gone, and the land sloped downward.

Glancing back, Dane could see the marks of their trail plainly. They would not have to be beamed back to the LB but simply retrace that.

The brach’s water came into sight, almost too suddenly for their own safety, for the ground was cut by a giant slash, and they stood on the brink of a very deep and steep-walled gully through which wound a stream.

“Outflow of the lake,” Ali said, squinting along the direction from which it flowed.

Well out from the shores, it was encased in ice, but in the middle was a clear channel, where they could see a swift—very swift—current passing from northeast to southwest. There was no sign of any frost-bitten or frozen dragon.

“Do you feel them now?” Dane asked of his alien burden.

“Not here. Away—beyond—”

“Which way?” Dane tried to pin that very vague direction to something definite.

“Over water—”

If they had crossed that river, they had indeed taken to wing. There was no other way of crossing. Dane could not understand how they had continued to survive the cold unless they were far less susceptible to the frigid climate than he supposed. Now it remained for him and Ali to find some place where the banks of the gulch could be descended, where the stream itself could be bridged. Within sight there was no such place.

They separated, Ali going northeast toward the lake, Dane southwest. But the river remained much the same until Dane came to a place where there was a break in the bank on his side. The thing that had gouged that was at river level, slewed around, trapped in the thick ice of the stream edge, the lip of the swift current tearing at it, sending spray to give it a further icy coating.

A crawler—made for heavy duty on rough land! There was no one to be seen in the cabin. He had not expected to find a driver, since the indications were that the vehicle had been there for some time, but he skidded down the broken bank to look it over.

Short of getting tackle as strong as that used at a port, Dane believed there was no chance of bringing this battered machine from its present bed. Perhaps if the river rose high enough, it might tear it loose and roll it on. That the crawler could be of any service to them he doubted.

It was not an agricultural machine with the various attachments used in farming. Instead, it mounted a small borer, now knocked askew, and the battered remains of a digger. This was a mining machine, or at least one for a prospector on a very small scale. In hopes it might give him some clue to a near camp or settlement, Dane worked his way cautiously out on the rough ice that had frozen about its treads to hammer at the cabin door.

When he forced that open at last, he wished he had not, for the cabin was occupied after all, though its occupants had fallen out of sight, lying on the floor, one above the other. Both men had been blaster- burned. There was a strip of ident plate on the fore of the controls, and very gingerly Dane worked that out of its slot. When—if—they returned to the port, this might give some aid in solving these deaths—these murders.

He closed the door, wedging it the tighter with chunks of ice to lock it. But before he left, Dane opened the supply compartment. The rations might be of some use to them, though he could not carry them now, but it was what lay in the transport bin he wanted most to see. They had been killed. Had that bin been plundered?

His hunch was right. The seal on that compartment had been burned out, and the door hung half melted. It was empty, save for a single small piece of rock stuck in the edge of the broken door, as if it had been caught there when someone swept the contents out in a hurry.

The piece of rock was small enough to take along with the ident, and if it had been valuable enough to keep behind a seal lock, it must have some meaning.

Dane had no way of judging how long the crawler had been here, but he thought by the ice that had locked around it, it had been some time. As he climbed to the top of the cliff down which the machine had dug its way, he backtracked a little. The trail left there ran parallel with the cliff rim for a short space before the plunge down, which might mean that the descent had not been an attempt to flee across river but that the machine had been running off automatics, already carrying a dead crew when it went.

Was this the same machine that had left the marks below the plateau? It was likely, only he was not to be sidetracked any longer to find out.

“Calling Thorson! Calling Kamil!” The signal was so sharp from his com that he started. “Return to LB, return to LB—at once!”

It was unlike Rip to be so formal—unless some emergency warranted that formality as a warning. The antline? Or, thought Dane, turning back on his trail at a steady trot and looking down at the crawler as he passed, had they two-legged enemies as well? Could those who had blasted the prospectors have turned their attention now on the spacecraft? Was Rip in such a position that he could not warn them save through his choice of words?

The brach made no sound. If the alien sensed trouble ahead as he had been able to sense the dragon’s actions, he was not saying so. Suddenly another thought crossed Dane’s mind, and it was almost as startling as that summons from the ship because it presented what was an impossibility as far as he knew. When they had found the brachs at bay before the antline, they had been inside the force field, a barrier that had kept the monster uneasy and unwilling to make an attack. And the dragons had been gone, also through that field. It had been a weak one, yes, but Ali had tested it, and it had worked. Then how had both species managed to pierce it?

“When the little one”—Dane spoke into the translator—“found the cage, there was a protection around it. Yet he went in, opened the door for the dragons—” Could he make the brach understand, or what had happened to the field? Had the aliens turned it off and then on again? They could turn it off if they had understood it. But to turn it on again from the inside was impossible.

The answer came hesitatingly as if the brach was also finding it difficult to explain a process he had taken for granted or else had not the proper vocabulary to make himself understood. “We think—if a thing is not alive, we can think what we wish to do, and it does that—”

Dane shook his head. If the brach meant what he said—that they had some control over the inanimate, some esper control—But the proof was that they had gone through the defense field. And the dragons, but it couldn’t be that the dragons could also do that?

“The dragons, how did they get through the protection?”

“The little one—when they hurt him—he opened it for them. They wished to go, so they used it,” the brach replied with prompt logic.

Well, it all fitted, if you were willing to accept the initial proposition that the brachs could think an open door through a force field. There was more and more to these mutated animals—no, they were not animals—these people (you must give them their proper status no matter what they had been on Xecho) than one could understand. What excitement they were going to cause when the scientists and lab techs learned about them.

Dane saw Ali coming on the run and slowed to a stop until the other joined him.

“Listen.” Dane pushed the brach question to the back of his mind as he quickly gave Kamil the story of the derelict crawler and what it contained.

“So you think Rip may have visitors?” Ali caught him up swiftly. “All right, we go in slowly and carefully.”

Both of them had been rubbing their mikes with a gloved thumb as they talked, so that none of what they said could be picked up by a listener. Now Dane was glad to pull down his visor against the frosty chill. Though there was a sun in the sky, it gave little warmth even here in the open, and as they passed into the shade of the wood again, even that illusion of light and heat was lost.

Approach the LB with caution they did. But when they saw what stood a little beyond it in the open, they were less suspicious. There was no mistaking the scout flitter of the Queen, Dane felt a warm wash of relief. So Jellico had sent for them—maybe they were now on the verge of solving the whole tangle. Reassured, they trotted on to the hatch.

Rip was inside, and Craig Tau, but the third man was not the captain as Dane expected, nor any member of the Queen’s crew. And Rip’s expressionless face, as well as Tau’s stiff stance, was warning that they were not at the end of their troubles.

The stranger was of Terran stock but somewhat shorter than the crewmen, wide of shoulder and long of arm, both of which were accented by the bulk of the fur upper garment that he had unsealed but not taken off. Underneath he wore a green tunic of a uniform with a badge on the breast consisting of two silver leaves springing from a single stem.

“Ranger Meshler, Dane Thorson, acting cargo master, Ali Kamil, assistant engineer.” Medic Tau made the formal introduction and added an explanation for his crewmates. “Ranger Meshler is now in charge in this district.”

Dane moved. He might not be right in his sum-up of the present situation, but one of the lessons of infighting that most free traders knew was to get an enemy or possible enemy off balance, to deliver the first blow and make it as unexpected a one as possible. “If you represent the law here, I have a murder, two murders, to report.”

He pulled out the ident strip from the crawler and the fragment of stone he had found caught in the plundered lock bin. “There is a crawler by the river, caught in the ice. I think it has been there for some time, but I don’t know enough of your planet conditions to guess how long. There are two men in the cabin—blast-burned. Their lock bin had been burned open, and this was caught in its door.” He put the stone on a shelf. “And this is the ident card from the control slot.” He laid the strip of metal next to the stone.

If he had planned to carry war into the enemy’s territory, he succeeded for a space, for Meshler was staring from him to the two exhibits and then back again.

“We have also to report”—Ali broke the short silence—“unless Shannon has already done it for us, the presence of a mutated antline—”

Meshler finally came to life. He was closed-faced now, all signs of surprise gone.

“It would seem”—his voice was as frosty as the air outside—”that you have been making a great many strange discoveries—very strange discoveries.” He spoke, Dane thought, as if he considered most not only improbable but also impossible, but at least they had proof, good solid proof of it all.